Call for Papers

VMCAI provides a forum for researchers from the communities of Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, facilitating interaction, cross-fertilization, and advancement of hybrid methods that combine these and related areas.

Scope

The program of VMCAI 2016 will consist of refereed research papers as well as invited lectures and tutorials. Research contributions can report new results as well as experimental evaluations and comparisons of existing techniques. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Submissions

Submissions are restricted to 17 pages in Springer’s LNCS format, not counting references. Additional material may be placed in an appendix, to be read at the discretion of the reviewers and to be omitted in the final version. Formatting style files and further guidelines for formatting can be found at the Springer website.

Submissions must be uploaded via the paper submission site.

Accepted papers will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Call For Participation

VMCAI provides a forum for researchers from the communities of Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, facilitating interaction, cross-fertilization, and advancement of hybrid methods that combine these and related areas. VMCAI 2017 will be the 18th edition in the series. The program of the conference includes 3 invited talks and 27 presentations of selected contributions.

VMCAI’17 is co-located with the international conference POPL’17, and it will take place in the Paris Jussieu Campus.

INVITED SPEAKERS:

Pascal Cuoq (Trust-in-Soft)

Ernie Cohen (Amazon Web Services)

Jasmin Fisher (Microsoft Research)

REGISTRATION:

SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS:

PhD students can apply for a grant covering their registrations fees. We encourage particularly female students to apply for this grant. Due to budget restrictions, a limited number of students can benefit from this support. Interested students must apply before Dec 9, 2016, 23:59 AoE, by sending a request to abou@irif.fr and David.Monniaux@imag.fr mentioning their name, affiliation, and contact information (address, email). Applicants will be notified by Dec 13, 2016.

VMCAI Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

This document sets out the VMCAI policy on conflict of interest. All Program Committee chairs should read and be familiar with concepts in this document before the reviewing process begins.

Purpose of COI Rules

The conflict of interest rules are established to maintain the integrity of the peer review process. Their primary purposes are as follows:

To maintain objectivity in reviewing. A reviewer with a personal connection to the author of a paper may feel that they can be objective in reviewing the paper. However, for the review process to be trusted, even the appearance of bias must be be avoided.

To maintain confidentiality of the review process. Reviewers must be able to speak freely, unconstrained by any perceived personal connections of other reviewers to the authors. Again, it is the appearance of a conflict that is important here, since the appearance is sufficient to inhibit debate and discussion.

The second point is of great importance. If a PC member with a conflict of interest obtains access to a review of the paper in question, the confidentiality of the review process has been violated. This means that it is very important to discover conflicts before the review process begins.

Definition of Conflict of Interest

Generally, a PC member, chair or SC member has a conflict of interest with a submission if they would be reasonably perceived to personally benefit in some way by acceptance or rejection of the paper. This is a matter of judgment, but there are some specific situations in which a conflict clearly exists. These include people who are:

An author of the submission.

A collaborator with an author of the submission. You should consider yourself a collaborator if you have published a paper with the author or are currently working together on a project, or have applied for a grant together, or have worked together in a consulting relationship. Collaboration on the steering committee of a conference or editing a volume also counts (but an editor of a volume would not be considered in conflict with a contributor to that volume). A collaborator relationship is not permanent. Work occurring or published more than four years ago need not be considered a conflict.

A person working at the same institution with an author of the submission. It is not always clear what constitutes an institution for this purpose. However, two people employed by the same university (even in different departments) or the same corporation, or the same government agency should be considered in conflict. Once the employment relationship ends, the conflict ends (so past employees of the same company are not usually considered in conflict).

A person in a mentor relationship with a submission author, for example thesis advisor/advisee. This conflict is permanent, that is, you may never review a paper of your thesis advisors or past advisees. A post-doc, however, should be considered as an employee and collaborator, but not as an advisee.

A person in conflict with an immediate family member of a submission author, or an immediate family member of a person in conflict. Generally, conflicts extend to family members because the interests of family members are perceived to be related.

Not all of these criteria are perfectly objective. In ambiguous cases** and in cases where deviation from the rules is deemed appropriate**, the PC chair(s) should use their judgment, keeping in mind the purposes of the COI rules as stated above: objectivity and confidentiality. If there is a reason why the person might appear to be not objective, or might appear to be connected to an author in a way that might inhibit free discussion, then there is a conflict.

Application of the COI Rules

Application of the COI rules is primarily by the PC members themselves. All PC members should be given a copy of this policy and asked to declare any known conflicts with submitted papers. In unclear cases, PC member should ask the PC chair(s) for guidance. The PC chairs should also, to the extent practical, make sure that obvious conflicts (for example, persons working at the same institution) are declared. The easychair system has a mechanism for declaring conflicts that prevents access to reviews and discussions by PC chairs and members with conflicts.

If a conflict is discovered after the review process has begun, the conflict should be immediately declared to the PC chairs either by the reviewer herself/himself or by any other PC member. All involved in the reviewing process of the paper should be notified, and the conflicted reviewer should have no further access to reviews or discussions. This must be done even if the result is that the number of reviews obtained is fewer than desired, and even if program committee discussion has already begun. If the case is not clear, the PC chairs may refer to the Steering Committee for a judgement (but of course, COI rules should be followed to ensure that SC members with conflicts are not included in the discussions).